BIOS days counted...

ZDNet reports from the IDF that the days of the BIOS are counted since a new replacement system is currently in the works inside Chipzilla, if you ask me I must have to say it was about time.

The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) promises to be some kind of small OS by itself, in fact the enhanced GUI might be the smallest of the changes from the original BIOS; finally partition and multiple OS managers will be built-in the system.

As part of the demonstration, he showed a network driver being replaced on a live machine, as well as multiple reconfigurations of various USB devices. Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers, system backup and restore, will be natural EFI applications.

I knew this was comming.... Multiple Operating systems on a PC not running in parallel, one booted at a time, but in layers, with a high level of user friendliness at the top and a low level at the bottom, where that OS will talk directly to hardware.

It could be a little like the OSI model for networking, except that it will be for operating system layers. You might even start to get open source BIOS OS's as one gets for user OS's like Linux.

The BIOS is the last place on the PC where people have to write in low-level assembler code, and we want to end that" he said. Instead, EFI is almost entirely written in C, and allows additions to be created using standard programming tools -- a statement that drew a gasp of approval from the gathered engineers.